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Hey Girl: Here’s Another Distraction. ~ Laura Ashworth

Laura AshworthNovember 10, 2013

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A couple weeks ago, while looking at photos of cats and writers on Pinterest (yes, this is how I spend my weekends) I stumbled across a veritable smorgasborg of amusing, yet sometimes downright strange, Ryan Gosling Hey Girl memes.

During these lost hours spent perusing the Hey Girl webosphere, the distinct feeling that I could be doing something better with my time washed over me. I ignored this feeling, clicking on yet another Hey Girl distraction, which in turn led me to this, the ultimate distraction—the Hey Girl Google Chrome Application.

“Sick of your Facebook friends? News getting you down? Instantly change all the images on a webpage to Ryan Gosling,” the application advertises.

Disturbing or amusing? I vacillated between both feelings on the subject.

Sometimes I found the application humorous, other times I found it representative of just how disconnected and celebrity-obsessed our culture is.

And so, I should have stopped there.

I should have disregarded the application and moved on, but I didn’t.

I’ve always been a curious creature. When I was younger, I was the kind of kid who’d see a random berry on a tree and eat it (thanks Mom for calling poison control that one time). So, adventurous-random-berry-eater that I was, I downloaded the Hey Girl Application to see what it was all about.

Big mistake.

You know that whole Pavlov’s Dog thing, that experiment where dogs were conditioned to react to stimuli in a different way through the ringing of a bell, the bell being the new triggering mechanism that conditioned their behavior?

Well, that happened to me. The Hey Girl application was the bell and I, the dog, in this unwelcome classical conditioning experiment.

At first, I used the application in jest (as witnessed by the above elephant journal screenshot). However, after a few weeks, I noticed that I’d begun using the application (flooding the screen with images of Gosling’s face) whenever the internet made me feel sad, anxious or scared.

Weird, I know.

I could have just exited these “sad, anxious, scary” websites.

I used to just exit these “sad, anxious, scary” websites.

But not now; now, I used Gosling’s face instead. Now I clicked on the Hey Girl application and Gosling arrived, like a plastic knight in shining armor, and replaces all the “sad, anxious, scary” images with his own and lessened my anxiety.

What the f**k was happening to me? I wondered, while simultaneously feeling the need to keep staring at Gosling’s face.

Am I really this programmable?

The irony was, I’d never even been drawn to Gosling. I’d never even cared that much about the Hey Girl Memes. He was never a big deal to me. Sure, I’d watched the Notebook and Lars and the Real Girl. Sure, he was decent looking.

But I can honestly say that I’d never thought of him as anything that could help me through times of emotional turmoil, or even slight emotional discomfort.

He’d always just been that guy I saw in a couple movies I liked, and that was all.

Yet, now he was something more. Now, thanks to the Hey Girl application (and no doubt my obsessive nature) he’d become some kind of weird Internet comfort food, a virtual mac and cheese.

But he wasn’t comforting, not really.

If anything, he was just another symbol of my desire to distract and distance myself from my emotions, from the here and now, from the right now.

And as I write this, as I’m in the now and feeling slightly uncomfortable (and therefore wanting to click on the Hey Girl application, thanks Google Chrome), I’m thinking, this is not okay. This is just one more thing. One more way to avoid real, honest moments.

And I am finally letting go of wanting to avoid these moments, retraining myself through meditation and yoga to be present and mindful within my life.

I’m finally starting to understand that emotions don’t run away from us just because we run away from them. They linger. They wait. They creep up on us later, peek-a-boo, they shout (at least, mine do).

I’m finally acknowledging the various feelings that move through my life, my body and my mind.

I don’t want to play emotional hide and seek anymore. (It was almost always just hiding anyway. There was very little seeking involved. Believe me.)

And as silly as the Hey Girl application is, most likely created in jest, I will not allow it to become one more thing that tricks me into feeling less, into turning away, into leaving emotional rooms within myself locked.

There is already so much noise in this world.

There is already so much clutter, so much plastic distraction shielding us from us.

And Gosling is one noise I can rid myself of, one cluttered room that can be uncluttered.

Laura! This is fantastic, I just love it! I love how it's this beautiful Ryan Gosling thing but there's so much honesty and deep-down truth in what you're actually saying – how we cover up so much of what we're really feeling with things that are shiny and plastic and "easy"…. It's a kind of reverse meditation, isn't it? Gosling Gosling Gosling, like we're tricking our brains into a kind of sort of sick mindfulness meditation – just on the wrong object! Thank you for this, brilliant!

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Laura Ashworth

Laura Ashworth currently lives in Richmond, Virginia and has also lived in Sedona and Phoenix, Arizona. She’s a mermaid at heart and thus her passion for barren, waterless landscapes often confounds her. She loves yoga, nature, traveling, art, animals, and anything written by Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut and Angela Carter. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Arizona State University and enjoys cold mint tea, thinking of inventive ways to cook a yummy-healthier version of pizza (which she vows to accomplish one day—any recipe ideas?), and is worried that this bio is starting to sound too much like a Match.com profile. She welcomes new friends. You can find her on Facebook here and Twitter here.

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